UA soccer hasn't got killer instinct

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Chris Jackson

The men's team is ranked fifth in the nation and the women are sixth. Couple those two with a No. 13 football team and a No. 16 volleyball team, plus preseason top 25 rankings for both the men's and women's basketball teams, and UA is looking pretty good.

Even smaller teams like swimming and golf are ranked. Last year, every sport at UA was, except two.

One was men's tennis, the other was soccer.

This year the soccer team had to be approaching the season with a lot of optimism. It's a 5-year-old program, and unlike the Florida Marlins, it couldn't bring in a treasure trove of free agents to bolster its line-up. Still, armed with what was the best recruiting class in history and most of last year's 8-11-1 team back, one would have thought soccer might finally be heading for the level of other Arizona sports.

Not quite.

Instead, the team is 3-8-2 and 0-4-1 in the Pacific 10 Conference.

And I think I know why.

The world needs nice people. After all, they balance out against people like me.

Unfortunately, in the world of sports you need to be able to get mean. You need to be aggressive, egocentric (not overtly, mind you) and able to attack with a vengeance.

The soccer players, who I interviewed a ways back when our beat reporter was sick and couldn't cover a game, are nice. They are excessively nice. They are too nice.

All year long the soccer team has been outshooting its opponents, but has never scored more than four goals in a game. Last weekend the team tied Washington State 0-0.

And every week after the game the players have said, "We have to work on our finishing." I'm still waiting.

I won't blame the coach by any means. I don't know how to coach soccer by any means. I played the sport when I was a kid and I was terrible at it, so a soccer guru I'm not.

But maybe it's time for the soccer program to try and catch up. First off, start recruiting outside the city limits of Tucson. While it's nice and all to have a lot of local players on the team to bring out the fans, Tucson is not exactly a bevy of talented athletes.

How many Tucsonans are on the basketball team? Or the football team?

Sure, they have huge budgets and staffs, but even smaller teams recruit very few local players.

Occasionally the coaches find a Shelley Duncan and land him, but otherwise the soccer team needs to look beyond the confines of Arizona for players.

And when the coaches look for players, maybe it's time to find some with a little fire. The current team doesn't have much, if any. I don't think aggressiveness is something a coach can teach, certainly not this late in a player's life. It has to come from within. It has to come from a desire to win and a confidence in one's self.

I'm not saying the current players don't have it. They just need to find it. They need to get tough.

This weekend the players have said they can get two wins up in Oregon. I'll believe it when I see it. I'd almost like to hear how they said it, just so I could tell if they believed themselves.

There's no easy way to instill confidence in someone. But if this team doesn't start scoring soon, goalkeeper Inger Airheart should go on strike. She seems to be the only one playing with any real emotion on the field.

Maybe it's the age of some of the players. Maybe it's just the other Pac-10 teams are really good.

But enough with the niceness. Get mean, Wildcats, or you'll be living in the shadow of the other teams at Arizona for the next five years, too.

Chris Jackson is a junior majoring in journalism and can be reached via e-mail at Chris.Jackson@wildcat.arizona.edu.